Quotes About Relationships

She's so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she's not, let's say, very…cerebral. And she doesn't have your backbone, your fiber.

It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.

The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.

I'm worry if I come to close, they'll say I'm overstepping. They'll say I'm pushy or… emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think that I don't care. I really honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day.There's this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.

Thinking time," their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face—so scary to the person's eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann

big, and when you all come to visit it's too small." "We'll be fine

He didn't talk about Derek at all and he avoided any contact with Willa or his brother, instead spending his evenings shut away in his room twiddling tunelessly on his guitar. Sean was the opposite: he followed Willa around pestering her for every detail of his father's death.

So, this is how it works," she said. "This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," he said. "And little cruelties," she agreed, and she swung his hand between them. He

And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

Oh, I know!" Willa said. "Who's going to believe a couple would bother divorcing if they've only developed different hobbies or something?

She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon," she'd begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she'd barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure.

So, this is how it works," she said. "This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.

Oh, that," he seemed to be saying. "Never mind that. All families have their ups and downs; let's just figure the age of this poplar.

So, this is how it works," she said. "This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," he said. "And little cruelties," she agreed, and she swung his hand between

Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa's experience.

because a longtime family joke was how Pauline put so much stock in marking occasions with gifts. Pauline made a shooing gesture with one hand (people tended to exaggerate her character, she felt), and Karen went on. "Mom, Dad, this is from all of us. We wanted to give you something to remind you of these past thirty years." And she took the package from George

She felt a lot less grateful to Derek now than she had when they were on the plane.

You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.

We've lost the last remaining chick in our nest! It's natural we would feel low." And she did feel low; no question about it. In many ways David was the child closest to her heart, although she'd expected to feel closer to her girls. After Alice and Lily left home it was just David and his parents, and the chaos died down and sometimes Mercy was able to hold actual brief conversations with him.

Didn't it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking.

you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this." "I thought you didn't want us to take sides." "No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say.

these people are a family. See? They want to learn how families work and that's what they think these customers are. Get it?" "Got it," Willa said.

And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. "Oh, poor you!" she would say. "You're looking so tired!" Or "You must be feeling so lonely!" Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children's opinion.